Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Originally, both the House and the Senate had what’s called a “previous question motion,” which allows a member of the body to move off whatever point is being debated—the previous question, in parliamentary parlance—and demand an actual vote. That’s the provision the House uses to end discussion even today. The Senate used to have that rule, too. And then it got rid of it, and created the filibuster as an unintended consequence.

“In 1805, Aaron Burr has just killed Alexander Hamilton,” Binder told me. “He comes back to the Senate and gives his farewell address. Burr basically says that you are a great body. You are conscientious and wise, you do not give in to the whims of passion. But your rules are a mess. And he goes through the rulebook pointing out duplicates and things that are unclear.”23 This is, it’s worth saying, a famous speech. It’s recorded that Burr, not always known as a great speaker and fresh from murdering another major politician in a duel, literally brought members of the Senate to tears in the delivery. It’s easy to inspire when you’re telling people how great they are and how magnificent their legacies will be when given history’s due consideration. One of Burr’s suggestions was to cut the “previous question motion,” so they did, apparently without realizing that they just made it impossible to cut off debate. “We say the Senate developed the filibuster to protect minorities and the right to debate,” says Binder. “That’s hogwash! It’s a mistake. Believe me, I would’ve loved to find the smoking gun where the Senate decides to create a deliberative body. But it takes years before anyone figures out that the filibuster has just been created.”

It wasn’t until 1917, when a group of senators filibustered President Woodrow Wilson’s bill to arm American merchant ships against German submarines for twenty-three days, that Wilson, a trained political scientist with strong views about proper parliamentary procedure, convinced the Senate to adopt a cloture rule allowing filibusters to be broken by a two-thirds majority of the body. And it wasn’t until 1975 that the threshold was lowered to its current three-fifths level. Given the way today’s weakened filibuster paralyzes the US Senate, how did the body survive, and even thrive, in this long era of unbreakable filibusters? The answer is that though the rules made the filibuster far more powerful for most of American history, the norms made it weaker. The filibuster was barely used. Just because a senator, a group of senators, or a party full of senators could filibuster didn’t mean they would. After all, if everyone was filibustering all the time, how would the Senate ever get anything done?

Filibustering isn’t a way lone senators make an unpopular argument heard, but a way the minority party in the US Senate sabotages the majority’s ability to govern, in the hopes that voters will punish the party that seems to be in charge.

Filibusters were rare in past Senates (with one gruesome exception: they were used routinely to block anti-lynching and civil rights legislation). According to official records, from 1917 to 1970, the Senate took forty-nine votes to break filibusters. That’s an average of slightly less than one each year. From 2013 to 2014, it had to take 218. That might’ve been a high mark of Senate obstruction, but there was no subsequent retreat to the rare filibusters of yesteryear: the 2015–2016 Senate session saw 123 cloture votes, and the 2017–2018 session hosted 168.

If the US government failed to pass a debt ceiling increase and thus stopped paying its debts, the markets would have to reevaluate the most core piece of financial information of them all. The result would be a global financial crisis, sparked by congressional infighting. Debt ceiling bills have always been used to embarrass the other side, but they’ve never been used as actual leverage because the consequences were simply too dire. That changed in 2011, when the newly elected Tea Party class of Republicans refused to increase the debt ceiling in order to increase their leverage to force spending cuts (a bit of anti-deficit dogmatism that tellingly evaporated the moment a Republican won the White House). The resulting crisis shook financial markets and led the Standard & Poor’s credit agency to downgrade US government debt.

Congress could have simply chosen to tie borrowing and spending decisions together, so there was never the possibility of legislators forcing a default. Instead, they left it hanging out there, a cocked gun that reckless legislators could use to hold their own country hostage unless they got what they want.

Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government’s role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for “balance,” constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Most observers saw Trump as a radical break from the Republican Party’s traditions and narratives. Ornstein saw him as the logical next step for a party that was transforming itself, its institutions, and its leadership into vessels of revanchist rage. Conservatives were choosing, again and again, the path of maximum confrontation and disruption, rallying behind the voices that promised to go where their predecessors hadn’t, to speak the words that had previously been whispered, to embrace the tactics that had once been shunned. Trump wasn’t a break with this Republican Party. He was the most authentic expression of its modern psychology.

The difference here is not that liberal activists haven’t wanted the Democratic Party to escalate its tactics in opposition; it’s that elected Democrats have largely been able to resist their demands.

The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

In my experience, it’s true that reporters for mainstream outlets are culturally liberal in their personal politics, though more mixed in their economic and foreign policy views. The newsrooms I know are overwhelmingly pro-choice, but they’re also biased toward deficit hawkery and the national security establishment. The dominant ideology, to the extent there is one, tracks Morning Joe, not the Nation. That said, mainstream newsrooms are built around incentives that are different from, and often contrary to, liberalism as a political movement. The New York Times and ABC News fear a liberal reputation—they want to be understood as neutral arbiters of truth—and reporting oppositionally and inconveniently on the Democratic Party is both part of the self-identity and the business model. Perhaps as important, the intermixing of mainstream and left news sources forces an adherence to professional journalistic practices. MSNBC’s reporters and prime-time hosts want to be respected by the Washington Post’s reporters. Slate’s writers want to do work that will get them hired by the New York Times. As such, the business models and reputational ambitions of the mainstream outlets don’t just discipline their work; they also discipline the work of the more liberal outlets that admire them. Conversely, Breitbart, Limbaugh, and the Blaze are operating in a self-contained conservative ecosystem, where part of the appeal is outright hostility to mainstream institutions. Over and over again, ...

In an essay for Vox, Dave Roberts calls this “tribal epistemology”—when “information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders.”

Democrats rely on a diversity of information sources that discipline their flights of fancy, while Republicans rely on a narrower set of media institutions that propel their polarization.

America is not a democracy. Our political system is built around geographic units, all of which privilege sparse, rural areas over dense, urban ones. This is most glaringly true in the Senate, where Vermont wields the same power as New York. But it is also true in the House, due to the way districts are drawn, and in the White House, due to the electoral college, and thus it is also true in the Supreme Court, which reflects the outcomes of presidential and senatorial elections. And power, of course, begets power. Republicans use their majorities to pass partisan gerrymandering plans, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter ID requirements, and anti-union legislation, and Supreme Court decisions further weaken Democrats’ electoral performance.

The voters who hold the balance of power in American politics are whiter, older, and more Christian than the country as a whole.

a different, more broadly competitive Republican Party is possible. As of the second quarter of 2019, the two most popular governors in the country—Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Maryland’s Larry Hogan—were Republicans in blue states.21 There is absolutely a GOP message that can command true majorities. But freed from the need to appeal to the median voter, Republicans have hewed to a more conservative and confrontational path than the country would prefer. They have learned to win power by winning land, rather than by winning hearts and minds.

Republicans know that their coalition is endangered, buffeted by demographic headwinds and an aging base. And that has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the GOP’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes. It feels to many that if they lose, they may never win again—and perhaps, with their current coalition, there’s a kernel of truth in that. Still, there is nothing more dangerous than a group accustomed to wielding power that feels its control slipping.

Democrats simply can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left—and they are—but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power.

it’s long past time for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico to have congressional representation. It’s one thing for the Senate to represent states rather than people. It’s another thing for so many Americans to be deprived of representation because the places they live have been denied statehood for political reasons. We live in a country built on the principle of representation. The fact that we deny it to so many of our citizens is indefensible. The fact that we particularly deny it to places with large African American and Hispanic populations compounds historical injustice and tilts the system toward white voters. If DC and Puerto Rico have representation, that would be another push for the Republican Party to veer away from deepening racial polarization as an electoral strategy.

It is disastrous that democracy has become a partisan issue, with Republicans viewing efforts to expand the franchise as conspiracies to weaken their party. It’s possible that a more democratic America would be a more Democratic America, but it’s also possible that a Republican Party that had to compete for more kinds of voters would reform itself to win that competition.

The idea here is to become more aware of the ways that politicians and media manipulate us. There are reams of research showing that our reaction to political commentary and information we don’t like is physical. Our breathing speeds up, our pupils narrow, our hearts beat faster. Trying to be aware of how politics makes us feel, of what happens when our identities are activated, threatened, or otherwise inflamed, is a necessary first step to gaining some control of the process.

Once we recognize that we exist amid an omnipresent conspiracy to manipulate our identities, we can begin the hard work of fashioning our environment to shape and strengthen the identities we want to inhabit.

we give too much attention to national politics, which we can do very little to change, and too little attention to state and local politics, where our voices can matter much more. The time spent spraying outrage over Trump’s latest tweet—which is, to be clear, what he wants you to do; the point is to suck up all the media oxygen so he retains control of the conversation—is better spent checking in with what’s happening in your own neighborhood.

If Republicans had lost proportionally to their popular vote deficits, they would’ve lost in landslides, and the party would’ve either reformed itself so it could win more votes in a changing country or shrunk into near-irrelevance. But our strange electoral institutions protect Republicans from the true consequences of the political path they’ve chosen, which has allowed the Republican Party to radicalize in ways that a more straightforward democracy would’ve punished.

That two-thirds of Republicans tell pollsters they believe Trump rightfully won the election is a crisis, and one fed by craven and cowardly Republican elites, who’ve refused to frontally challenge Trump’s lies. Most House Republicans voted against certifying the results of the election, and many, like House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, joined a lawsuit to overturn those results. They’ve lit a match in a country soaked in gasoline, and they should be ashamed. Not everything in American politics can be blamed on polarization. There is, in any age, a place for leadership, and danger beckons when leaders fail.

A party that keeps losing voters has two choices. It can change itself—its agenda, its standard-bearers, its temperament—to win over new voters. Or it can turn against democracy, using the power it still holds to disenfranchise or weaken the voters who threaten it. The Republican Party, for now, has chosen the second path and chosen it decisively.